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The Kennedy Assassination: New Details About the Transfer of
Power
Steven M. Gillon
Huffington
Post
Wednesday, Nov 4th, 2009
Exactly when did doctors give up their efforts
to save Kennedy's life? And when did Lyndon Johnson learn that
JFK was dead? These are the central questions that need to be
addressed in understanding the transfer of power on November
22, 1963. The questions may be obvious; the answers are not.
The Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was shot at 12:30
pm. He was declared dead at 1:00 pm, and Johnson was informed
at 1:20 pm. Most authors writing about the assassination, even
those who question the conclusions of the Warren Commission,
have accepted this timeline.
New documents recently opened to the public call into question
key parts of this timeline. The first piece of evidence is a
long memorandum prepared by Parkland hospital administrator
Jack Price, who was standing outside Trauma Room #1 as President
Kennedy was wheeled in on a stretcher. Price gave the memorandum,
which outlined his actions over the next few hours, to author
William Manchester. Last year, Manchester's children granted
me access to their father's rich collection of materials housed
at Wesleyan University for my new book, The Kennedy Assassination
- 24 Hours After.
According to the document, Price wrote that Dr. Kemp Clark,
one of a team of physicians working on Kennedy, came out of
Trauma #1 "and told me that the president was dead and
that he would sign the death certificate." Clark did not
record the precise time of his conversation with Dr. Clark,
but he did note that just after they finished speaking he walked
down the hall and saw a priest come in the door. Price asked
his assistant to escort the priest to the Trauma room.
The priest was the 70-year-old Reverend Oscar Huber. His arrival
at the hospital is crucial to fixing an approximate time for
when doctors had given up working on Kennedy. The most reliable
source for establishing the time of Huber's arrival is Dave
Powers. As a special assistant to the president, Powers played
many roles - receptionist, gatekeeper, greeter, and repository
of trivia. On trips like this one in Texas, he was responsible
for keeping track of the schedule, making sure the presidential
party did not fall too far behind.
As they were running into the hospital with the President's
body, Powers had instructed secret service agent Jack Reedy
to find a priest. For the next few minutes he kept checking
his watch, asking the secret service: "What's the story
on the priest?" Standing outside the emergency room with
Mrs. Kennedy, he occupied himself by writing down everything
he saw, including the names of the doctors as they responded
to the call for help. "Now I was carrying the President's
schedule and I was writing this thing down in pencil or ink,"
he told NBC newsman Sandor Vanocur in an oral history at the
JFK Library.
In a handwritten note that he turned over to Manchester, Powers
stated that he saw the priest coming down the hall at 12:50
pm. If true, it would mean that Dr. Clark had already determined
that Kennedy was dead at least 10 minutes before the official
time stated by the Warren Commission.
If the doctors were ready to declare Kennedy dead at 12:50
pm, why then was the official time listed as 1:00 pm?
The time of death was a fiction created to satisfy Mrs. Kennedy.
According to Catholic doctrine, the last rites had to be delivered
before the soul left the body. If her husband was already officially
dead before Father Huber had a chance to administer the sacrament,
it would not have been valid. "Father do you think the
sacrament had effect," she asked Huber in the emergency
room. He tried to ally her fears. "I am convinced that
his soul had not left his body," he said. "This was
a valid last sacrament."
Whether doctors had stopped working on JFK around 12:50 pm
or at 1:00 pm, may seem like a minor point. The issue is vitally
important, however, to understanding the timing of the transfer
of power.
For the first few minutes after they arrived at Parkland Hospital,
those around the President may have been able to maintain false
hope that doctors could save Kennedy. But by roughly 12:50 pm,
when Dr Clark told Jack Price that he was ready to sign the
death certificate, it was clear that doctors had stopped trying
to save his life. The President was dead, and everyone knew
it. Within a few minutes, the secret service notified its office
in Washington. Shortly after 1:00 pm, Robert Kennedy would get
a phone call at his home in Virginia informing him that the
wounds his brother suffered proved fatal.
Yet, Lyndon Johnson, standing in a cubicle a few yards away,
was still in the dark. The chaos and confusion of the moment,
and the profound sense of grief and loss among Kennedy's close
aides, only partially explains the delay in telling LBJ that
he was now President. Kennedy aides were in denial that their
beloved JFK was dead, but also that LBJ, a man they despised,
was now President.
When did they finally tell Johnson the news? LBJ told the Warren
Commission that White House appointments secretary Kenneth O'Donnell
notified him of Kennedy's death at 1:20 pm.
Johnson's statement, however, does not stand up to scrutiny.
Just as Kennedy aides pushed back the official time of death
to 1:00 pm, it appears that Johnson may have pushed back the
clock as well.
LBJ Secret service agent Emory Roberts directly contradicted
LBJ's timeline. In a lengthy interview with Manchester, Roberts
claimed that he was the one who broke the news. "At 1:13
pm I told Lyndon Johnson that President Kennedy was dead,"
he told Manchester. "One of my agents had told me that
the President was dead and I checked with the agent outside
the door of trauma room 1. I went to Johnson. Cliff Carter,
Rufus Youngblood, Mrs. Johnson, and the President were there.
I said, 'the President is dead, sir.'" According to Roberts,
Johnson turned to Cliff Carter and told him to make a note of
the time. "Someone mentioned that the time was 1:13 pm,"
he noted.
Oddly enough, Cliff Carter, LBJ's chief aide on the trip, contradicted
his boss and supported Roberts' account. On the ride back to
Washington on Air Force One, Carter dictated notes about the
events he witnessed at Parkland Hospital. He observed that Roberts
was the first to deliver the news, and that two minutes later
O'Donnell entered the room and made the announcement again.
Carter repeated the story to Manchester. "There have been
many wrong accounts of this." Roberts "did the notifying,"
he recalled. "He just said, 'Mr. Johnson, the President
is dead.'"
How could Johnson have been mistaken about such important details?
It's possible given the extraordinary pressure he was under
that he simply misremembered the sequences of events. More likely,
Johnson was using O'Donnell as political cover to blunt any
criticism that might emerge from Kennedy loyalists, especially
RFK, that he had been overeager to assume the presidency. Despite
receiving a steady stream of pessimistic reports about Kennedy's
condition, and being informed explicitly by the secret service
that JFK was dead, Johnson refused to take charge until he received
the word from O'Donnell.
Technically, the powers of the presidency transferred to Johnson
at 12:30 pm when the fatal third bullet shattered Kennedy's
brain. For a variety of reasons -chaos and confusion at the
hospital, the grief of Kennedy's close advisors and friends,
their distrust and disdain for the new President, and LBJ's
insecurity -- the United States was without a functioning head
of state for nearly 40 minutes.
"When the people find they can vote themselves
money, that will herald the end of the republic."
- Fall Of The Republic - Buy
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